Foreign journalists who go to the Uyghur homeland are spied. So are Uyghurs who visit Shanghai.
by Massimo Introvigne
IPVM (Internet Protocol Video Market), a private but highly authoritative research group on video surveillance technology, is targeting Alibaba again. In 2021, it reported that the Chinese marketing and technology giant had developed and patented (as did other companies) face detection technology designed to recognize Uyghurs, prompting accusations of racism.
On May 2, IPVM published a new report, indicating that Alibaba has supplied Shanghai police with a system capable of identifying and reporting immediately foreign journalists who plan to travel to Xinjiang, as well as Uyghurs coming to Shanghai.
The system has been created for the police of Shanghai’s Songjiang district, where more than 1.5 million residents live. It is, however, presented as a “case study” that can be adopted in the future by the entire Shanghai police force—and beyond, since it is also being tested in other cities.
The system consists of 26 “modules” that create alerts for certain categories of incidents connected with specific events and persons. The modules work because the data are conveyed to Shanghai police’s cloud platform, which runs on a dedicated Alibaba cloud.
One of the modules flags foreign journalists who buy train or plane tickets to go to Xinjiang, or reserve hotels there. This information is immediately reported to the police, which presumably will interview the journalists, prevent them from traveling, or make sure that they will be put under surveillance as soon as they will arrive in Xinjiang.
Another module creates a system that will “spot Uyghurs coming to Shanghai.” Interestingly, Uyghurs are one of the categories specially monitored, together with prostitutes, illegal immigrants and foreigners with expired residence permits, and known drug traffickers.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
